O these bookless days & nights! Losing notebooks & missing shows & caterwauling during the blue moon. More fights, more interviews, more glum office interiors. The corrosive scent of cleaning agents. Nevertheless, diary, Jimmy & I did not slow down.

We painted a pregnant woman's house in the hills. Pine needles & dessicated wings lined the runners of her sliding windows. The floors were sap-sticky, as if, over viscid time, the rooms had become forest. A woodlet of doors. At night, skeins of white hair (mine) mingled with the cries of raptors.

Jimmy also had his magazine opening, which we mildly dreaded, drinking glasses of port to calm our nerves. However no violence occurred. . . Only the punch K, newly-returned from East Coast hijinks, threw at the end of the night, outside the Ruby Room. Which didn't result in anything awful (knock on wood); the assailant later apologized to his cold-cocked victim.

We woke up to hangovers, fried chicken at the local soul food joint, missing boyfriends, broken-down cars, miaowing a game of Name That Tune. We were the Alleycats, yes, making music you want to lob a pan at.

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